Feeding cats, January 2002 and March 2016

Young Buster with Famdamily and Old Buster with ginger cat

January 21, 2002.  One of the first photos taken with the Nikon 775, my first digital camera, days before I left on my last sabbatical leave.  The mother cat, calico Iris, and one of her last large litter, famdamily, of kittens (lower left), is joined by a new arrival, the still lanky and adolescent male that I came to call Buster.  Though as an alley cat, house raised but left behind by student house-renters when they moved and during my last travels before I retired cared for only by the friends who cared for my house, he has become one of the most affectionate and dependent elderly neutered cats imaginable, now nearly 15 years old, which the digital camera's data records.

21 March 2016.  Though it was very overcast, I relied on the Nikon 1 v2 to record Buster, who never learned NOT to share food on the side porch, though he is as territorial as can be about his yard and the sanctuaries around and under it as ever.  One of my wisest friends warned me of the wisdom of letting neighboring cats in for company but NOT (repeat NOT) feeding them, since they aren't mine and I don't want to be adopted!  Buster, ever semi-feral, with Spring weather, insists on eating outside, unless it's raining.  Well, you see what has happened.  The ginger cat (less orange than Buster but without any white extremities, not even on his underside or his chin) evidently is house bred (neutered and clean and well nourished), but Buster still wants to eat outdoors in fresh air and doesn't mind company, though if he stares too hard the ginger cat will back away, then sneak back in a couple of minutes.  They act as if the kibbled food were a carcass and they were taking care to pick it safely.   I do not want a young cat to adopt me, but no one claims him so far.  

2 March 2016.  Solid-color, or even striped cats free of white points and bellies, are rarely seen hereabouts; this is the only one I've seen within walking distance of my house in all the thirty years I've lived here.  I notice that he does have white whiskers and wonder if show cats of this sort must have tan whiskers, too.  He has amber eyes.  Note that he is a 'pure' shorthair; Buster has a short but fluffy undercoat.  He is very timid of me, but that is because I make it plain that Buster owns me.  

Supposed Romans à Clef

A strained association, but Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon occurred to me 

Shop window in Alexandria, VA, AD 2006

Visiting a friend who had been my roommate in college and then a friend, though usually by mail, ever since, I took the occasion to look over this justly famous old city, Alexandria, where she had settled.  This true bow window is evidently the ornament of a dress shop (which was closed at the time I passed it).  Well, we have nothing in Baton Rouge (or for  that matter in Berkeley) to match the main street of Alexandria, so even in a light rain I was delighted to explore it.  Still using a camera that took small-capacity cards, I did not take enough pictures to write a blog post on it, and you can go to Wikipedia now, anyway.  It did amuse me to let the window display recall Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, a century earlier, and for a decade now I have wanted to use this favorite photo in this blog (so please indulge me, since I had wracked my brain for something, of my own, not copyright, to head this post).

*****

If someone could not help experiencing everything in old Alexandria turned into famous modern paintings and probably scarier things, too, along with uncontrollable streams of meanings alien to them, that would be manic paranoia.  On the other hand, this is a composition with scantily clad  plaster models, coping with a window difficult to use for a display to the street, that does vaguely recall the Demoiselles.  That resemblance would not excuse supposing that the shop's owner had deliberately borrowed their narrow pyramidal arrangement from Picasso's painting, as if, perhaps, he or she acknowledged that the bare shoulders were suggestive here in a window looking onto the street (as Picasso ironically intended by the "demoiselles" of the painting's title).  Such a supposition is what I'm complaining of.

*****

Let me first beg your pardon for letting two days intervene before completing this post.  

Most literary authors draw on their own inner lives and also on their own friends and families. Some, preeminently Virginia Woolf, have left us diaries that discuss their own works as they were published, as if, one might think, having begun as a literary reviewer, the habit of reviewing her own work was preordained (though, of course, there's more to it than that).  Besides, eventually she wrote memoir-essays and volumes of letters.  I have always found them integral to her oeuvre.  On the other hand, except for Quentin Bell's, I have put less stock in the biographies.  I have come to regard, as many others do, Mrs. Dalloway as her greatest novel, but I took this occasion to re-read Jacob's Room and Between the Acts, too; the latter being perhaps my favorite, no matter how I judge it (why judge it, in fact?).

The point is that the stream of consciousness of Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway can only be drawn on her own experience.  It is unlike any other such account.  For, though today we have many studies and memories of bi-polar experience, their authors are either less gifted or more reticent or consciously scientific.  When I was young and first read my way through Virginia Woolf, I could hardly bear to re-read Mrs. Dalloway.  All the characters in that novel are memorable, but all the rest of them were copable for a young Berkeleyan in the arts.  Thus, it is fair to say, I have come to Septimus from a literary point of view for the first time: what Woolf did was to give its own voice to a unique person's manic experience.  It is impossible for me to imagine what it must have cost her, not least in exhaustive revision of the text.  But this is not the place for a non-specialist venture.  The point is that Virginia Woolf did draw endlessly on her own life in creating the lives in her fiction, and not only in the high play of Orlando.  It is agreed, for example, that Jacob's Room remembers her brother Thoby.

But (and this is the point of confusion), Ethel Smyth, the composer, was the longterm friend of Virginia and Leonard Woolf as well as of E. F. Benson, where in the whole Dodo trilogy she plays an important rôle as Dodo's friend, Edith.  And Benson, much as I adore his writing, was happy to incorporate Ethel, whole hog, in the Dodo trilogy.  Of course there are exaggerations,  just as there would be in the Mapp and Lucia books, but anyone at the time would, and did, recognize Ethel Smyth in Dodo's friend.  So did she, and she is recorded as richly enjoying it.  But Virginia Woolf did not incorporate real persons in her novels in that way.  Clarissa's being in love with Sally Seton is not comparable, though it is an important motif.
In any case, Margot Asquith did NOT accept identity with Benson's Dodo.  Yes, Benson knew everybody, the Asquiths included, and yes, he did range through his whole acquaintanceship throughout his career.  But he knew, as I said, "everyone", and nothing is to be gained for the reader by worrying over who Dodo "really" was.  As a reader, I rather resent being asked to keep considering Margot Asquith.  I admit, I have not read her biography, but the biographies of persons in society, not to mention those close to the royal family, do not impress me as being either deep or subtle, and only if the biographies of persons in society were esteemed as literature would I want to read them.  If they sat for Cecil Beaton, and were the subjects of his best photographs, I'd be interested in how he photographed them.  I don't especially relish bell peppers, but I love Edward Weston's photographic studies of them.  What makes so much of E. F. Benson great reading is that (unlike Mr. Fellowes) he is writing of his own experience at the time: his account of the Armistice in London is given to Dodo, but it is his own, and I can't remember reading another as good.  On the other hand, he has made a unique woman, Dodo, in novels ranging from her youth in the 1890s to the end of World War I, doubtless from his acquaintance with real women (yes, of the same social class as Margot Asquith), just as Rye gave him the material for Mapp and Lucia, just as his David Blaize novels are drawn from school memories (and, yes, in part of his own, not least the daydream and dream memories of the pre-school child in David Blaize and the Blue Door which are far too specific and exact to be anything but his own).
So here I am again urging the pleasure of reading E. F. Benson on everyone.  Of course, not only is he a full generation older than Virginia Woolf, and he is easy reading of the highest kind if ever there was any, but the case of Ethel Smyth, whom the Woolfs wrote about privately and discreetly (though quite frankly, not regarding her as a great composer) perfectly exemplifies the sheer stupidity of spilling ink to prove that a work of fiction is a roman à clef.
Speaking of stupidity, was it really necessary for me to write a post about this?  Only, why do the persons who write for Wikipedia bother with such stuff?

The "new" learning of the elderly

The pleasure of finally learning things that might have been learned more than a half century ago 

Eastern Hercules Beetle.  About two inches long.  Photo, Atlanta GA, courtesy dp.

The Stag Beetle, Bill Welch says (Naturally blog, for 21 January, 2015, 3rd and 4th images) is one of the largest in England, but Denise's Eastern Hercules, truly nearly the width of her palm, is bigger.  Yet they look related.  The Stag, Wiki says, is limited to SE England, and the Hercules to the SE of the USA.  Both of them, new to me (and my ignorance of beetles is almost perfect) delighted me.  The largest flying cockroaches here are about as large, but they lack great structure and the ease of handling (they are really ugly!) of these rare beetles and of scaraboids in general.

I greatly enjoy reading E. F. Benson (Mapp and Lucia), but besides his wonderful general intelligence, his writing is enlivened by the kind of general interest and knowledge of all sorts that, generally, only leisure can enable, ideally (as in his case) by the kind of adolescent education that the best schools provided (he was born in 1867 and at the usual age was sent to Marlborough College, the model for that in his novel David Blaize, which is purely and devotedly Late Victorian), and as wonderful a source as can be imagined for college cricket and for all the other interests and activities of that life, not least carefully noted nature walks.  I cannot express my debt to Bill Welch's blog, Naturally, for its devotion (amateur in the truest and best sense) to the insects and plants in particular and his photographs.  I  have learned that the most serious shortcoming of my almost George Gissing-like adolescence, which helped form me and gave me strength and some kinds of discrimination,, is exactly the converse of what E. F. Benson's provided (and then some).  Likewise, my young friend Denise is a far better observer than I am.  Indeed, if it weren't for its probable limited expectancy, being old is so good that I'd love to be old forever.  For the moment, may I just recommend to everyone reading E. F. Benson.  Also, the Naturally blog.  It is unlimitedly worthwhile.  As an example, the Link that I gave was to the use of Comtois horses, which look almost like the oldest French cave drawings of Palaeolithic horses.  Be that as it may, this blog post on coppicing led me to look up Comtois horses in another treasure of the present decades, Wikipedia, by means of which I spent a whole afternoon studying the training of these strong and calm, beautifully stocky and short (only 14 or 15 hands) working horses and the man who trains them.  Well, I can't do that with the Hercules Beetle, though I learned that Denise had handled and watched it for quite a while before releasing it.  Yet I wouldn't have got her to show me the photo that she took if I had not learned of stag beetles from Bill Welch's post and, reading E F Benson, been instantly interested in the boy, David,  in the early chapters of Benson's novel, when David was still a school boy.  By the way, never mind what journalistic reviews say about this novel.  And don't smirk at the idealism of its last chapter, either.  (I am still searching for my photo of a bright green emerging cicada which, to my delight, chanced on my rear screen door, attached itself, and was still emerging when I came out in the morning; its wings were as lovely as any dragon fly's).  Just read both the blog and E. F. Benson.

It was on July 10, 1912 that with a tiny camera, awaking to something utterly surprising and lovely, this cicada, still damp and green, just emerged from its puppa, having chosen my rear screendoor as an ideal place to attach itself.  Later that day the cicada had departed, but the shell stuck to the screen for a couple of months.  Of course, the source for such fairy wings must have been dragonflies, but I must admit that I hadn't realized them before: here they became real to me.  

*****

Anyway, in the middle of one of those cricket games in David Blaize (if anyone can tell me where to read up on the rules and scoring of cricket I shall be most grateful), twice in one page, and only that once, I came across a surprising word, google.  This, in fact, may be its first appearance, a vernacular word, such as players themselves come up with (cf. dribble in basketball, about the same age and of the same kind, alluding to a particular kind of movement of a ball or puck--any relation at all in vernacular usage to puckishness or mischievousness?).  Actually, the US OED that comes on my iMac says

1. googly |ˈgo͞oglē|

• noun ( pl. googlies ) Cricket
  a ball bowled with a deceptive bounce.
  ORIGIN early 20th cent.: of unknown origin. 

And the dolls whose eyes' irises go off to the side, to look askance,  of course, were called googly-eyed.  You see them commonly on Antiques Roadshow.  They, too, dated from the turn of the last century and the eyes were made to go off to the side.  The 10th edition of the Webster's Collegiate no longer has the word, though it was listed simply (as in the OED) in the 1956 edition of the Collegiate from my undergraduate days.  It was the two-volume 'Shorter' OED that first put me onto this line of thought.

And what does that prove?  Nothing at all.  Dribble, goggle, google, wobble, and the like, I think, are words that can happen more than once, and Google's own account of its name, from a child's coming up with googul for the prodigious quantity requiring place-markers all the way across a page, need not be related except that these are just the kind of words that are unknown in origin precisely because they are not pedantic but, on the contrary, part of the essential remnants of baby talk.  Yet the sense of going awry runs through all our pre-Google usages, and it is also far earlier (cited as in print in 1904).  It matters, however, only as it mattered to Partridge.  Words just do matter.

As so often, it was in Eric Partridge that I found a citation ; he was interested in such things:
Origins: A Short Dictionary of Modern English, Macmillan, 2nd edition, 1959, s.v. jig, 7.

New Readings of Old Books-2

When Wood showed me how to get over the levee to the River

By the time we clambered down the moist bank of the levee, the sun had just set over Port Allen in the west; it was late Spring, and the river was half flooded around the swamp willows.  This was taken (early 1980s) where one could drive to the top of the levee where also some of the agriculture school cattle were grazing, on the dry side, about half a mile south of the LSU campus.  Of course, it is film, not digital, Kodachrome probably.

I want to write about a Memoirs, Present Indicative, of Noel Coward, that I first read when I was about to graduate from high school or during the three semesters that I was at the California College of Arts and Crafts.  In either case I was living in Berkeley (so was the family) but did not yet have access to the University library.  I recall finding it at the Egyptianizing Berkeley Public Library on Shattuck Avenue and checking it out there.  It really made an impression!  It was a time when I was reading biographies and memoirs of opera singers, Emma Calvé, Maria Jeritza, Lotte Lehmann, Geraldine Farrar (my goodness: princes and tennis stars, cf. Anna Netrebko), Chaliapin, Caruso, Alma Gluck: probably her first, because her daughter, Marcia Davenport, had written the novel that really astonished my adolescent imagination, The Valley of Decision, and then Of Lena Geyer, so that it was no wonder that opera stars were exciting—and wasn't it just as well that I could imagine Manon, for example, delicate, petite?  I also haunted the used-book stores for 78 rpm records.  It was a lovely couple of years.  At the rooming house, at 2622 College, which qualified as Approved Housing, since I was under age, in the evening we sat around a large round kitchen table and filled sketchbooks and talked, and talked.  Neither before or later (until perhaps now) did I have free time for such preoccupations.  By the time I turned 21, in 1955, I was beginning graduate course work.

So what about that Sunset over the Willow Swamp on the Mississippi?  Well, the photos of famous people are under copyright, and by now those years in the early 1950s and now even the early 1980s have become sentimental in their own right, and I have made a habit of using pictures as headers.  I might break my neck if I went down the slithery mud today, to take new ones, and my coaevals are dying and my former students are at the height of their careers, very busy, so I treasure these pictures.  Besides, they are part of me, and you may make of them what you wish.

(Have to re-write body of this post: please excuse):
Having lost the tangled thread for this post, I'll just note the kind of thing I had in mind.  Noel Coward had reminded me of the craze for African American night-club music (and it was picked up, too, in Downton Abbey, Season 5).  But I also had noticed in novel after novel the protagonists having been described as appreciating a Grammaphone Society recording of the Bach Concerto for two violins, which reminded me how much shorter the pre-WW II catalogues had been, and how important the really outstanding 78rpm sets had been.  Then there was that Blackbird business: a comment on a YouTube offering of a 1927 song, "Bye, bye Blackbird", and some young person was astonishingly puzzled by the lyrics of the song.  Nor did I at the time know about the all African-American musical show Blackbirds, which predated the song by a year or so.  The song's 'blackbird' was inspired by Florence Mills, who enchanted London and, I think, Paris as well, until her early death in 1927.  She was adorable, as her portrait photos show (and perhaps the inspiration for the figure of Betty Boop?), but she never recorded the song in question though we do have a recording of one with a similar reference.  Like Noel Coward, Paul McCartney. who sang the 1927 "Bye bye" song so lovingly in the "Kisses on the Bottom " concert at the Capitol Records studio a few years ago, surely knew whose song it was, and Bessie Smith actually recorded it when it was new.  However, and this is the kind of realization (better late than never), I have a two-CD album  of Josephine Baker in her youth that includes two of the songs from Blackbirds.  But these were European recordings and were not noticed, apparently, by the person who compiled the list in the Wikipedia.  But Josephine Baker's knowledge of Mills, who died so young, and her covering Mills's songs for performance in France, adds one more detail to the history of the effect (with the Prince of Wales, Edward, attending Mills's concerts repeatedly) of the most enchanting African-American  performers  in Europe  at the time.  It was my retirement-age pleasure reading that took me to the abundant material in Wikipedia on the musical  Blackbirds and Florence Mills.  You'll find lots of material, both documentary and pictorial, on Florence Mills—all except her voice.  Josephine Baker was only five years younger, but happily lived till 1975.

New Reading of old Books

Detail of a poor photo of a rabbit (Jill's), but all I could think of as a heading was a rabbit, and Durer's is too wild, too fine, and too alert to illustrate Dorothy Sayers' characterization of an unhappy drunken college girl: "The general impression of an Angora rabbit that has gone loose and was astonished at the result"—but what I need is the face, and of an Angora, and I can recall but cannot find the image of my sister Linda's big old rabbit.

In any case, that characterization is from Gaudy Night, and I hadn't meant to risk being disappointed after fifty years by that one.  Actually, I was wondering whether I would still admire her Dante commentaries as much as I had when the three Penguin volumes were new, but the font is too small till I get new reading glasses.  And, in the first place, looking across the room at my big oaken chair with the mask of a goat pan on its back, I was thinking of a student couple in Eugene, Oregon, c. 1970, who had found a chair just like mine but with a lion mask (indeed mine is the only one with an aegipan mask).  I think it was to Roger that I lent the paperback of Busman's Honeymoon, as fun to read, and he found it "castrating".  That rather spoiled the fun, though later I realized that one needed to know that the personality of Peter Wimsey had evolved so that, though he might not have liked the book, Roger might have chosen a different epithet.  Besides, between the two wars, and especially after the trenches, working with what we call PTSD, and after the worst experiences of World War II we called Shell Shock, as I recall, was de rigueur for writers who took themselves seriously.  After Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf, et al., who called Dorothy Sayers a feminist?  And girls raised in Oxford were generally well educated even before the women's colleges.  There's a whole literature on them.

Anyway, I found out that Busman's Honeymoon had been a highly successful play before she turned it into a novel a year later.  That accounts perhaps for its wonderful conversations, perhaps more numerous than even in her other detective stories.  But only those readers who just don't like Sayers (even as I just don't like P. D. James, though it seems to me normal to have one's favorites, and James has her own admirers), and I enjoyed Busman's Honeymoon more than ever.  So much, in fact, that I re-read Gaudy Night, too.  It had been the first of her books that I'd read, and I enjoyed it even more for getting all of the references (I think, all of them).  This time, between the two of them, I have decided finally to read Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.  Kindle obliged handsomely, but they don't have those three volumes of Dorothy Sayers' commentary on Dante in eBook format.  Famous poetic versions abound, and those everlasting Doré illustrations, but not commentaries.  I suspect that we are supposed to treasure the Commedia,  but not to study it, not to get from it what Dante put in.  Not even if one wants an Italian commentary.  I pulled down the Penguins, but the font that seemed so reasonable until recently now might as well be 6-point.

Surely I am not the only reader-for-pleasure to pluck choices from chapter headings in the books I'm reading currently.  There's always plenty more.  It is not the sort of reading you'd get course credit for in college, but it was there that I formed the habit.  You study for one final exam then steal time to read something that appeals to you before facing preparing for the next exam.  During final exams you don't have to dress or go out to do anything...  I protest, I didn't read detective fiction during exam weeks; in those early days I'd read travels or journals or sometimes the novels by authors that I couldn't afford to take whole courses on (or, to confess it, that I hated to answer the predictable essay questions on, spoiling the book for me!).  

I think I'll write a couple more posts about reading things I've always meant to read or that I haven't read again since I was fifty years younger.

Here is that chair again that I got in the 1960s.  It really is white oak, but the black is a product called japalac, which is original.  Roger and Judy (I think I have their names right) "cleaned" their lion-head one, stripping it right down to the bare wood.  That was the fashion at the time, alas.  The chair is American Renaissance Revival, c. 1885, I think.

Old Buster Copes with the Weather

October 27, it rained so hard that the whole porch was wet.

So long as it is still not cold, Buster wants to stay outdoors till sunset (and we still have a couple of days left before we change the clocks).  I think he actually enjoys the outdoors, but staying dry is a problem when a very large Pacific hurricane crosses the mountains of Mexico in incessant sheets of rain and floods whatever it can (not that it's as bad as having a hurricane of our own).  The front porch is the best place, but Buster will not nap on wet wood, either.  He kept complaining to me as if I could make it stop.  I did go outdoors onto the grass to encourage him: he did follow me out and dutifully peed.

Then I caught sight of the second-rate telephone book that they deliver.  No harm trying.  I opened it wide, right in the center, and Buster perceiving dry paper lay down on it and slept all day.  Well, there's a good fifty pages of advertisements for accident-insurance lawyers there, so maybe he smelt all the printer's ink.

October 28, it was almost quite dry, and he ventured a sunbath.

Next day the sun shone dry enough that the concrete parking pad in back let him find the sort of place that he likes (which I'd have felt was still too damp) and there. about 1:00 p.m.. I saw him happily fast asleep.

Fact is, it is important to him to mind his territory.  But he's big enough that the younger cats do, so far, respect him.  He's 15 years old.

I'll try to get something more serious in a day or so.

And the Panaghia in the Chartres crypt?

Begging comparison with the Theotokos in the Haghia Sophia apse, posted at head of last post?

Chartres.  Crypt (i.e., pre-Early Gothic preserved, but the painting is dated end 12c to beg. 13c).  The Virgin in Majesty, i.e., what the Greeks would call Panaghia.  In my humble (meant seriously) opinion, the 'visit' of the West to Constantinople in 1204 accounts for not a little in Gothic figural arts.  So much, and not least in the Ile de France, was of Byzantine origin.  I don't know whether Henry Adams and his traveling group saw the painted image in the crypt where it would have been at the altar end of the crypt which served as the principal sanctuary of Notre Dame: I don't know whether it was covered.  Even in its present condition, though, one can see its dark blues and the gold of the haloes, and the drawing is strong and elegant.

Between Abbot Suger's chevet and completion of the West Rose only a little later than the figures of the Royal Portal, (and some time before the recorded installation of the South Porch in 1206), that is, after the fire of 1194 and while the main nave as designed in 1197 was still incomplete, this painted image of the Virgin may have been the main one just at the time when the crusaders ran amok in Constantinople in 1203-4.

*****

I did read Mont St-Michel and Chartres .  It could not be more different from The Education..., and I still don't like it very much, though I keenly appreciate  (and even envy) the depth in which he devoted himself to every aspect of the territory that his group (Lodges and others) had covered, though from what I know of pre-WWI touring cars it can't have been wholly comfortable on the roads (a present-day Fiat 500, or Citroen, would be more so).  It is a guide book one might say for travelers with ample time and access to the best books.   Why did Cram like it so much?  It was not just a Baedeker, and it explored its quarter of France in unprececented depth—in a way that devout books never meant to do, and it was literature.

But whereas The Education is timeless and unique in its personal depth, Mont St-Michel is dated. Besides, by his own account, from boyhood and all his life, Henry Adams had an antipathy towards academic research, particularly what is for us century-old German scholarship.  One need not share that antipathy, though, to sympathize with his need to do so (since he had the leisure and means for it) and to write the kind of study that he really wanted to.  The worst one can call this is elitist: that to appreciate and understand Mont St-Michel  one needs more general education and leisure for thought than one can hope to get from this book itself, though the experience of sharing with Adams is worth more than any textbook.  Still, in my opinion, Erwin Panofsky's essay, "Three Decades of Art History in the United States," the Epilog in Panofsky's Meaning in the Visual Arts, casts even more light than he intended, and he is generous to his American predecessors, in particular impressed by their regarding all Europe as one.  Henry Adams, however, was (quite understandably and pardonably) a learned amateur, and, he'd be quick to claim, an amateur in the best sense.  Young students of my generation were unfamiliar with Adams's kind.  At the same time, they seem to be less in touch with what the combination of the Paperback Revolution (much of it, like LP music recordings of the same period) made available to us a quarter to a half century ago, and that because (speaking of California in the West more than of many places between the Rockies and the Mississippi) as many as  half of our professors had been born and educated in Europe.  The ready availability of specialized studies, in new translations, made the history of art and architecture a full-fledged discipline in America (as also in England, where it had been rather regional).  Today there are many new books, as well as video works, that are more abundantly illustrated but very, very seldom go beyond the interests of the educated layman (but a layman, though more varied, also less fully educated than a century ago and providing a larger audience).  The more general works are certainly less elite (today we are horrified that only potential students whose families can afford well known universities may be able to contemplate that sort of education).  There are no longer. as in the wake of World War II, works that can be published simply for the cost of publication.  Obviously, electronic publication is taking their place, but I doubt if there are enough teaching scholars to form an adequate bridge of mentors (so to speak).  I don't know.  And I am not up to date in medieval studies; my classical background gives me ready access to them, via Greek and Roman studies, but I am not placed (in the deep South of the USA) to know whether most of the young assistant professors are prepared to form the educational bridges aforementioned.
So, I'll mention besides Erwin Panofsky only a couple of famous studies that impressed me most (and which I'm sure still are as good as ever):
—Adolf Katzenellenbogn, The Sculptural Programs of Chartres Cathedral.  Norton, 1959.
 —ed. and with a preface by Robert Branner, Chartres Cathedral (Norton Critical Studies in Art History), 1969.  This contains articles by most of the authors, I confess, that I most esteem but also takes pains to represent different approaches, including on the stained glass Maurice Denis and Henry Adams himself.  Branner plainly says that he feels that an American author ought to be included and, since there are other topics where Adams might be more questionable, gives him the windows that he loved so much.  The Branner book, also, like most of the later books (with offset printing) is very adequately illustrated.  I'm sure, of course, that it no longer costs $2.95.
—Also as good as ever, Emile Mâle, The Gothic Image (transl. Dora Nussey).  Harper, 1958.
The authors included in Branner's volume really do provide a wonderful survey of Chartres studies.
Perhaps it is just to consider Mont St-Michel as the work that inspired Cram's generation as the post-WWII works inspired mine.